European Exploration and SettlementOn June 18, 1541, Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto led the first Europeans into southeast Arkansas. Although the exact location and routes of de Soto’s Arkansas journeys are in dispute, it is known that his expedition encountered thriving villages of Native Americans numbering in the thousands in connecting settlements along the state’s southeast border. In 1673, the French, led by Father Jacques Marquette, descended the Mississippi River and entered southeast Arkansas to claim the land. He was welcomed by the Quapaw who held a feast and celebration in his honor. The Quapaw, also identified as "Arkamsea," or "People of the South Wind," spoke a dialect called Dhegiha Siouan, closely related to the Osage, Omaha, Kansa, and Ponca languages. They appear to be realted to the woodland peoples and probably had traveled from the Ohio River Valley to the Arkansas River Valley some time after de Soto's expedition had left the area. Their territory once extended from the mouth of the St. Francis River northwest to the White River, north to the present-day site of Ozark (Franklin County), south to the Arkansas River, west to the Canadian River in Oklahoma, south again to the Red River, and east to Point Chicot on the Mississippi River—an area encompassing some 30 million acres.

Marquette's expedition was followed in 1682 by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, a Frenchman from Canada with fifty-four people in tow, who boated down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. One of La Salle’s lieutenants, Henri de Tonti, an Italian by birth, returned in 1686 and built the first European settlement in the future state at Arkansas Post (Arkansas County)—a crude, wooden encampment close to the mouth of the Arkansas River and near a Quapaw settlement called Osotouy in present-day Arkansas County.

Louisiana Purchase through Early StatehoodJefferson County, like all of Arkansas, was acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. On August 24, 1818, the Quapaw ceded their lands to the U.S. government and ended up with only 1,500,000 acres in southeast Arkansas—mostly Jefferson County—on August 24, 1818. Chief Sarasin was the last and most important chief in the Jefferson County Indian territory; he is buried in the cemetery of St. Joseph’s Church in Pine Bluff. Robert Crittenden, the first territorial secretary, acquired what remained of Quapaw lands in southeast Arkansas on November 15, 1824. The Quapaw had relinquished their remaining tracts in the area in a treaty signed at Major John Harrington’s lodge on the north bank of the Arkansas River near the present location of Lock and Dam Number Three in Jefferson County. At first they were relocated to land already possessed by the Caddo in the Red River Valley. Represented by Jefferson County plantation owner Antoine Barraque, they traveled to the Red River Valley in 1826, only to return to Jefferson County shortly thereafter. Eventually, they signed a relocation treaty which placed them in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

One of the first permanent settlers of record in Jefferson County was Joseph Bonne, who brought his Quapaw family from Arkansas Post to live on a pine tree–covered bluff on the Arkansas River that would become the namesake and location of Pine Bluff. Bonne’s crude lodge became an important entry point for travelers and settlers making their way up the river. Several other families, largely of mixed French-Quapaw ancestry, lived along the Arkansas River both before and after the Louisiana Purchase, mainly with land grants issued by the Spanish government shortly before it relinquished the lands to France in 1800.

The first steamboat, the Comet, arrived at Arkansas Post in 1820. Steamboat travel on the Arkansas, which began in earnest in the late 1820s, opened southeast Arkansas for trade and commerce. Territorial governor John Pope approved an act to establish the county on November 2, 1829. The first county seat was at Bonne’s cabin. On August 13, 1832, the county seat was moved to Pine Bluff, which was surrounded by sawmills and rich farmland. Cotton farming was established early on in Jefferson County, with the Bayou Bartholomew providing easy transport for both cotton and timber. The county’s first governor/mayor in 1849 was John Selden Roane.

The first church of record in Jefferson County was Methodist, established in 1829. A small Catholic church, the first Catholic church in Arkansas, was built in January 1832 at the small hamlet called Plum Bayou.

On June 15, 1836, Arkansas became the twenty-fifth state, and Samuel C. Roane became the first state senator from Jefferson County. W. Phillips was the first representative. As steamboats plied the Arkansas River, land travel to the state capital at Little Rock (Pulaski County) became more accessible by the congressionally approved Columbia to Little Rock Military Road, which bisected Jefferson County from the southeast.

The county’s first newspaper, the Jeffersonian, was published weekly under editor W. E. Smith. Methodist and Catholic leaders instituted formal education for Jefferson County children in 1838. St. Mary’s Catholic Church established an academy to educate children, as did the Methodist Society. From 1850 through the 1860s, settlers from states east of the Mississippi poured into Jefferson County, followed by a large contingent of German Jews from Bavaria.

Civil War through ReconstructionDuring the Civil War, Jefferson County sent two companies of voluntary militia into the war: the Jefferson Guard under the command of Captain Charles Carlton and the Southern Guard under the command of Captain Joseph W. Bocage. When Union general Frederick Steele captured Little Rock on September 10, 1863, a delegation of Jefferson County residents petitioned Steele to send Federal troops to the county to establish martial law and end the looting and raiding of farms and homesteads by guerrilla bands taking advantage of the war. On September 14, 1863, the Fifth Kansas Battalion under the command of Colonel Powell Clayton was dispatched to Pine Bluff to restore law and order. Confederate forces under the command of General John S. Marmaduke tried to dislodge Union forces in an attack at Pine Bluff on October 25, 1863, but they failed. For the rest of the war, Jefferson County was under Union control.

Post Reconstruction through the Gilded AgeBy the 1890s, Jefferson County entered what historian Jim Leslie has referred to as the Golden Era. Because of its prodigious cotton production and location near the Arkansas River, the county attracted many industries, businesses, and public institutions. Pine Bluff had become the state’s third-largest city. By the turn of the century, the county had the W. B. Ragland, Samuel Franklin, and M. L. Bell Gas Works; the Gabe Meyer public school system in Pine Bluff; the Buck, Smart & Company Bank of Jefferson County; Branch Normal College (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff); and the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad. In 1881, Major C. G. Newman founded the county’s most successful daily newspaper, the Pine Bluff Commercial, which is still in operation.

Known as the “Narrow-Gauge King,” James W. Paramore in 1883 established the St. Louis Southwestern Railway (later known as the Cotton Belt Railroad), which would connect southeast Arkansas with St. Louis, Missouri. This railroad was a catalyst for the 1915 construction of the first concrete pylon, steel-supported railroad and commercial travel bridge (the Free Bridge) across the Arkansas River in southeast Jefferson County. The Cotton Belt Railroad established its main maintenance shops in Jefferson County in 1894, making it the largest employer in the county until the Pine Bluff Arsenal was built in northern Jefferson County in 1942.

Early Twentieth CenturyIn 1912, Wabbaseka resident Willie Mae Hocker designed the state flag as part of a contest sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Near the turn of the twentieth century, Harvey Couch moved to Pine Bluff from Columbia County, made a fortune in the emerging telephone exchange industry (later Southwestern Bell), and founded Arkansas Power and Light Company, which made him the state’s first multimillionaire and one of the state’s most influential citizens. He entertained figures such as Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. During Hoover’s administration, Couch was the central figure on the president’s federal Reconstruction Finance Administration, established to lessen the effects of the Great Depression.

The Flood of 1927 is considered Jefferson County’s worst natural disaster, killing dozens of people and destroying tens of thousands of acres of cotton and hundreds of farmsteads and homes. With the Great Depression of the 1930s, it took the county decades to reclaim the economic status it was gaining before the flood.

Roosevelt’s New Deal programs—especially the Farm Security Administration—established farm cooperatives at Lake Dick and at Wright in Jefferson County. These cooperatives helped settle and economically sustain hundreds of Depression-ravaged, rural farm families by providing them with housing, barns, seeds for crops, farm machinery, food-producing plants, and schools. These cooperatives helped save the county and the state during the Depression.

World War II through the Modern EraWorld War II brought a federal munitions arsenal to the county, the Pine Bluff Arsenal, which employed 9,450 workers from around the county in the war years. After the war, the arsenal became a stable employer and a permanent post for the army’s production of munitions and chemical agents during the Cold War. It now employs 1,735 workers. International Paper Company provided economic and employment stability by locating its papermaking plant in the county in 1957. At its production peak in 1962, it employed 1,400 workers. Jefferson Hospital (now Jefferson Regional Medical Center) opened in September 1960 and employed nearly 150 medical professionals at the time. Today, it is Jefferson County’s second-largest employer, with 1,850 workers; Tyson Foods is the top employer, with 1,955.

For additional information:Andrus, Edward N. “The Pine, the Bluff, and the River: An Environmental History of Jefferson County, Arkansas.” MA thesis, University of Arkansas, 2011.